Brief assignment 4: Browse Match.com, Gay.com’s personals, Spring Street Network (via Nervc.com or TheOnion.com or http://www.springstreetnetworks.com/) or another dating or friendship service and analyze: How do these services support/fail to support dating and/or friendship?

Analyze the service with particular attention to the analysis of ‘profiles’ using Goffman’s concept of the presentation of self. How well does this analysis derived from face-to-face encounters apply to online encounters? Can it be modified, or are these fundamentally different kinds of encounters?

Analyze the service considering the issue of deception and identity.

I spent a lot of time exploring Match.com’s services before my two giant misconceptions about these services came to light. Each foolish misconception involved limits to my self-presentation through these services.

The First Misconception: I can express myself freely on Match.com through a photo

Photos are probably the best way to transcend the awkward stilted boxes of information that dominate personal profiles on most dating and social networking Web sites. (Do you drink three times a week, or socially? Are you here to find friends or “activity partners?” Etc. Have the words “activity partner” ever left your lips, other than times when you were making fun of online social services?) The photo on Match.com is like the tie on the standard-issue 1950s grey corporate suit: it’s the only “color” allowed and it’s pretty much the only place where you can really make yourself stand apart.

But Match.com strictly polices and censors its members’ photos. Match.com doesn’t just cut out lewd or offensive photos, they apparently block photos whose style or fashion don’t match their corporate tastes. Like this one:

This photo is far too raunchy. Match.com won’t let me publish it in my profile.

This is the default mug shot that I use to represent myself nowadays on many social networking Web sites. It’s not a particularly well thought-out photo, it’s not particularly sharp or attractive. But it’s hard to see how it could be considered obscene or offensive. Here’s how I chose this photo: at some point I wanted a mug shot for some service (Friendster I think), so I browsed through the photos on my hard drive. Of the three contenders, that was the best thing I came up with. I cropped out the head shot and that was that. Now I just post it wherever a photo is needed.

So I submitted it to Match.com and waited. And waited. A few days later I got a form letter saying that Match.com won’t let me use that photo, that in photos they don’t allow any obscene content or images blurred beyond recognition, that they won’t accept illustrations or photos obviously doctored using image-editing software. (Of course all that was swaddled in smarmy propaganda about how Match.com is committed to serving its customers and keeping this a safe place and so on.)

But none of the prohibitions in the form letter, or in the on-site photo instructions, seem to apply to this photo by any stretch of the imagination. (I mean, “obscene” is notoriously subjective, but I doubt even the most tightly-wound tightass would find anything in my poor little mug shot obscene?) I followed up and got back a couple more worthless form letters, then finally I got a response from what seemed to be a human being. First the human paraphrased the form letter, then when I pressed for specific reasons why –my- photo was rejected, I was told that it might be too small. But it was larger than many of the photos I could see in other people’s profiles! I was told that perhaps my sunglasses obscured my face too much and made me unrecognizable. I gave up. My Match.com profile lies dormant and photoless.

If Match.com forces its members to post photos that look like they came from old high school yearbooks, is it any wonder that so many Match.com profiles come across as boring and dorky?

The Second Misconception: Match.com Mobile will notify me when I'm near other matches

I was jazzed to hear about the new Match.com Mobile service because I assumed it was something that it definitely isn’t. I thought this would be essentially a glorified Lovegety, I thought someone in the online dating and social networking business had finally made that obvious leap and built a modest little bridge between online and offline social worlds. I thought that finally I could play with the special search and match and notification benefits that come with online social services, that I could supplement my cramped and unrealistic online profile with my infinitely more subtle and flexible and human face-to-face self presentation, and that I could supplement my "given off" face-to-face signals with more "given" signals, from pieces of a profile constructed and presented via computer mediation. I was wrong.

I thought that Match.com Mobile would allow me to publicize parts of my Match.com profile in the real world with other members through our mobile devices. I thought it might let me set search criteria and to notify me when my phone comes within bluetooth range of a Match.com member whose profile meets those search criteria. I would love to play with a service that notifies me when people who share my interests are nearby. Such a service would not be very difficult to implement.

I’ll have to look elsewhere. Match.com Mobile is a crippled version of the same old Match.com. It fails to take advantage of any of the real benefits that mobile devices bring to the table, and it fails miserably to work with (or even work around) the constraints tied to mobile devices and the people who use them. It’s essentially the desktop Match.com hastily crammed onto a tiny screen without a keyboard; the old features haven’t been properly redesigned for the new platform and the obvious features you’d expect to see in a mobile version are missing. Hint to Match.com: “write once, run anywhere” doesn’t really work even on the back end; in interface design, that philosophy will destroy you.

This isn’t at all clear from the Match Mobile marketing hype. Phrases like these cover the Web site: “Flirt anytime, anywhere with Match Mobile,” “Connect anonymously with singles near you on your mobile,” “Search other local singles” and “Flirt on your phone.” All of this seems to imply that members can discover and “connect with” and flirt with other members whom they pass near by as they wander the offline "real" world with their phones. So the first three times that I got notifications on my phone that Match Mobile “found” other members and when these people started sending me chat requests on my phone, I started looking around wherever I was at the moment, trying to spot the person who wanted to chat. Then I realized that these people might be on the other side of the country at the moment; the service wasn’t taking into account our current locations or our proximities to one another. Apparently, Match Mobile just notifies you when another member registers for the services and reports a home city vaguely close to your own. Talk about missed opportunities!

Wrapping it up

To answer the other assignment questions:

"There is no there there."

Weblog assignment 2: Use key concepts from the readings to analyze the information model, cultural dynamics and/or dramaturgy of an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) such as SIMS, Counterstrike, Evequest, There!, etc. If you are not familiar with any MMORPG, please explore one. There! has a free trial from http://www.there.com (requires a Windows box).

I'm fine with calling there.com a “game” because it’s something that people do for fun that’s not necessary for survival or procreation. Some of our game readings mostly concerned games that have winners and losers and stated formal objectives. Nonetheless we can use these readings to learn a few things about there.com and its players and designers.

I think Salen, Zimmerman and Laurel might have clever things to say about there.com so let's pay them a visit. Sit back, pour yourself a scotch on the rocks and remember to fasten your seat belt.

There.com: The Information Model

Salen & Zimmerman [reading notes here] describe the concept of balance between “noise” and redundancy in games: a successful game poses enough uncertainty to keep things interesting, to prevent the game from becoming overly confining or predictable, but it avoids making the information transmission so uncertain and inefficient that play seems arbitrary and pointless. Veer too far towards either end of the spectrum and the game becomes a drag.

There.com strikes me as clearly situated somewhere on the the noisy/uncertain side of things. Consider the game’s lack of a formal objective. Even within the smaller games that I saw within there.com that include objectives (the hoverboard racing game, for instance), pursuit of the objective is not strictly enforced or encouraged and players can use bits of the game for other purposes. For instance, when I got bored with the hoverboard race I just jumped one of the racetrack ramps a few times repeatedly for fun, then raced off the game track and took the hoverboard with me for the rest of my stay in the there.com universe, riding it when I wanted fast medium-distance transportation, carrying it around the rest of the time.

Of course there are clear constraints too; I couldn’t eat the hoverboard and I couldn’t sit down with a few other players to bet on a cockfight or smoke a crackpipe. At least not in the gameworld. I couldn’t teleport to the places that banned teleportation, I (apparently) couldn’t walk into the paintball arena without a gun, and so on. But the constraints were a lot fewer and less severe than in more formal games. This was clear from the beginning. The game is about exploring and socializing more than it is about racking up high scores or vanquishing enemies.

Regarding games as being either “perfect information” games in which all information is known to everyone (like in chess) vs. “imperfect information” games (like poker) wherein some information is hidden, I suppose there.com should be considered clearly an imperfect information game because so much of the game involves social interaction and nobody knows what other players will say or (within certain limits) do from moment to moment. But in the case of an exploratory social game like this, the perfect vs. imperfect information classification doesn’t seem like a very useful or meaningful one.

Salen & Zimmerman could write entire books about how there.com embodies the concept of game as cultural rhetoric. Players must choose from very specific forms of interaction. In particular, the body types and clothing styles and the gestures and other available conversational devices all fit a particular style. You might call this style "wealthy young Western urban hipster as portrayed by turn-of-the-century Hollywood." To some extent this is unavoidable - as Salen & Zimmerman write, “beliefs, ideologies, and values present within culture will always be a part of a game, intended or not.” To accommodate every conceivable human style of appearance in a game like this would be impossible, but I tried making my male character put on a skimpy woman’s top that Janet Jackson would be proud of, and sure enough, this wasn’t allowed.

There.com as Theater?

At first glance there.com seems a fine embodiment of Brenda Laurel’s view [reading notes here] of computers as theater and of her ideal computer design as one that supports action and drama. After all, users take on avatars, actors who undertake action and interaction with one another on a beautiful fictional backdrop. Users can and (I thought) do use gesture effectively to reinforce their verbal messages as well as to convey messages on their own. I think that Laurel would praise this as the sort of “close coupling” of multiple interface modalities that she encourages (even if those modalities take place between multiple human players and are never translated between human and machine).

But I think there.com misses the boat by trying to staple a clunky, standard Windows drop-down (or drop up, in this case) menu bar onto this immersive world. It doesn’t fit. Rather than mapping most input actions directly to the people and objects they involve, there.com makes the classic Windows-and-Mac mistake that Laurel hints at when she writes that coders mistakenly view the computer “as a tool and not a medium.” (A sidenote: I don’t think Laurel chose the best terminology because for many tasks people –do- use computers as tools and that –is- an effective way of looking at them, and tools don’t necessarily reduce drama or stifle action. Tools don’t kill drama, people kill drama. More specifically: designers who shove tools into our faces inappropriately kill drama. But don’t get me started.)

The there.com user has to keep redirecting her locus of attention from the important things (the objects and people in the game) to care and feeding of the tools (sifting through the drop-up menus to figure out how to trigger the most basic action, for instance; navigating between game window and game Web pages; configuration of tools). Rather than just hammering the nail into the board, the user has to break her focus from the nail and spend five minutes configuring and checking the status of the hammer before anything can happen. Then one of the hammer configuration screens spawns an error message and by then our player has lost interest or, more tragically, has lost a priceless piece of serendipity in motivation.

Weblog Assignment 1: Propose a typology of the functions, origin and duration, size and density of social networks, based upon your own experience.

(According to Webster's dictionary, "typology" means "study of or analysis or classification based on types or categories.")

Context is everything. The structure of any classification of social groups depends on the motivation behind the classification. This depends on what, in the classifier's opinion, are the primary purposes that social networks serve. Let's break from our assumptions and look this over through other eyes.

Typologies; three different ones:

1. Machine's-Eye View: Human social networks cultivate a rich meat, metal and asphalt topsoil along the Earth's surface that promotes the gestation of digital life.

     Functions- Coat the planet with a terraced outer crust of machine-friendly asphalt that connects millions of garages, fuel tanks, landing strips and seaports, thereby creating an environment that will support the race of living machines through its infancy. Transport machine bits and fuel from deep within the Earth to more desirable locations along the asphalt crust. Assemble machine bits to form proto-machines and connect millions of these primordial building blocks together, engendering the evolution of digital life. Shelter proto-machines from power surges, from the elements and from the Kaczynskis of the world during the gestation period.

     Origin and Duration- Bloodline-centered networks: up to 10,000 years but usually much shorter; nation-centered networks: up to 2,000 years; networks centered on an individual industry or institution: ephemeral duration (up to 1,000 years); networks centered around individual humans: negligible duration.

     Size and Density- Bloodline-centered networks: varies widely at any given time from hundreds to billions of humans; nation-centered networks: up to 1.5 billion humans; networks centered on an individual industry or institution: usually 1,000 - 3 million, traditionally clumped in specific regions but becoming more widely distributed.; networks centered around individual humans: up to 1,500.

2. Corporation's-Eye View: Human social networks provide a food supply, a bloodstream, a nervous system and muscles needed by Earth's giant multinational corporations.

     Functions- Feed host corporations billions of dollars each year. Consume or carry off all the corporations' waste products. Carry out all of the work needed to ensure corporations' luxurious quality of life, including physical labor, financial services, computer operations, human resource management. Attract new servants via sales and marketing efforts. Produce and train new servants via childbirth, parenting and mass media. Construct and maintain communication networks necessary to connect each corporation's vast array of resources and branch offices, fusing all these pieces into a single entity. Minimize government-imposed inconveniences via legal and legislative intervention.

     Origin and Duration- Executive staff networks and legal/legislative support networks: most culled from the higher education system; usually last through the lifetime of each corporation. Supporting staff networks: culled from local human communities wherever a corporation operates; duration ranges from several weeks through the lifetime of the corporation. Consumer networks: origin and duration varies tremendously depending on mission statements, marketing plans and other strategies pursued by the given corporation; traditionally this has also been affected in some regions by government-imposed inconveniences, although these matters have become less consequential.

     Size and Density- Executive staff networks and legal/legislative support networks: usually less than 100 humans, often clustered in the largest cities where the given corporation operates. Consumer networks, supporting staff networks: varies widely from a few thousand to several million; density also varies considerably depending on the nature of the corporation.

3. Meme's-Eye View: Human social networks constitute a habitable environment and a giant playground for memes.

     Functions- Manufacture billions of brains capable of receiving and transmitting language; distribute them across the planet. Develop technologies of clothing, shelter, medicine, and food processing that can allow memes to dwell comfortably in their biological hosts across all regions of the planet. Build hatchery-brains wherein new memes can manifest themselves. Amplify the range of freakish mutations in these brains by propagating ideals of "individuality" and "creativity" and "fun," thereby allowing a wide range of memes to manifest themselves. Invent social traditions and institutions that encourage consumption of intoxicants to fertilize brains and to encourage richer and more productive meme manifestations. Create space probes and communications transmission systems so that memes can explore other planets and solar systems. Develop communication reception systems capable of allowing memes to visit Earth from other planets and solar systems. Invent Jacuzzis so that memes can relax at the end of a long day.

     Origin and Duration- Language-centered networks: these morph from one language to another over time. The average language-supporting network survives from 500 to 1,500 years until the form of language spoken at the beginning of that period would be completely unintelligible to most members of the network at the end of the period. Individual industry-centered networks: up to 1,000 years. Fashion, arts and music networks: as long as 500 years. Networks supporting organized religion, nationalism, war and other masochistic, drama-producing metamemes: up to 1,000 years. Computer-mediated networks designed to cultivate Nigerian e-mail scams: ongoing duration, approximately forty years as of this writing.

     Size and Density- Language-centered networks: most smaller than 100 million and clumped locally, some larger than 3 billion and spread widely. Fashion, arts and music networks: many smaller than 1 million; a few of these networks have mutated into malignancies that infect more than 5 billion human minds, but these corporate behemoths support only a few narrow memes, they block the propagation of all other memes and they are being dismantled by antigen memes. Individual industry-centered networks: usually 1,000 - 3 million, traditionally clumped in specific regions but becoming more widely distributed. Networks supporting organized religion, nationalism, war and other masochistic, drama-producing metamemes: approximately 6 billion, extremely widespread. Computer-mediated networks designed to cultivate Nigerian e-mail scams: approximately 200 human brains, clumped mostly in Florida and on certain Caribbean islands.